What is Millennial Hobby Energy?
Ambitious Expansive Swallowing NO DON'T MONETIZE ME HELP
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Millennial Hobby Energy is going from growing four dahlias to growing 500. It’s running a couch-to-5K and then suddenly you’re making plans for two marathons a year. It’s falling down a quilting rabbit hole on TikTok and waking up with $800 worth of fabric. It’s going golfing for the first time in a decade and suddenly you’re going on four guys’ trips and have a closet full of golf-specific rain gear.
“I got a sewing machine thinking I’d make a couple of things,” one Culture Study reader explained, “and now have purchased fabric for/planned out an entire wardrobe? It’s my entire personality?”
Or: “I'm mid-40s and what started as a casual garden hobby 15+ years ago has become a capital-H Hobby complete with tall stacks of gardening books on most of my home's flat surfaces, several courses at the local botanical garden, many hours of native plant webinars, sincere Google searches into landscape design degrees and info-finding on Master Gardener certification. I happily spend my weekend shopping for rocks. Last weekend I told my husband I wanted to study botanical Latin. My first trip to my local garden centers in the spring is basically a religious experience. I'm all in.”
And: “Tennis! Rediscovered it 1.5 years ago and Strava tells me I’ve now played 135 times in the last year. Joined a team, 3 leagues, a club, subscribed to tennis channel.”
Millennial Hobby Energy is big and ambitious. It’s swallowing. It’s barely keeping the impulse to optimize and monetize at bay. It’s not unique to millennials, but it is endemic among us. I have a bad case of it, but I don’t think it’s bad — it’s just part of my personality, alongside the paralyzing fear that the other shoe is always about to drop. But I am trying to wield it carefully: in a way that won’t torch the hobby groups I’m a part of or my enjoyment of the hobby itself.
First, some backstory. (If you’re a longtime reader of this newsletter and know my hobby story, feel free to skip ahead).
From age 26 to 38, I didn’t have a hobby, unless “working all the time” could be considered a hobby, which it cannot, because it is work. I exercised to discipline my body, but otherwise, every hobby of my youth and early 20s — skiing, gardening, playing piano, baking — had been devoured by my jobs, first in academia and then in journalism. I told myself I didn’t have the time or the resources to make a hobby happen. Weekends were for working or desperately recovering from work. After-work was for commuting home, doing a little more work, and falling into bed.
Around age 37, I began to think of my lack of hobbies as a clear sign of my broken work brain. Who was I, what did I actually like doing, other than making a list of things I needed to do and then methodically doing them? I started writing about what a hobby feels like in the early days of this newsletter, in February 2020. Was running a hobby? Sometimes yes, sometimes no. But skiing — which, shortly before writing that newsletter, I did for the first time in fifteen years — that was a hobby.
As I wrote then,
“…after a few runs, all of those feelings of childhood came rushing back: feeling strong and fearless and hedging that thrilling line between total control and losing it, but also the glorious, unbound expanse of the mountain and the day. It felt at once easy and challenging, natural and all I wanted to do forever. I think that’s what a hobby is supposed to feel like: not an obligation, but a state you’re always returning to. It doesn’t have to be expensive, it doesn’t have to be organized, it doesn’t have to depend on other people. It just has to be yours.”
Less than a month later, we were under lockdown, and a different set of hobbies emerged: indoor plants, cooking my way through Melissa Clark’s Dinner, cycling. Then I quit my job at BuzzFeed and my schedule became my own, and I dove deep into what I now think of as a hobby-filled life. Gardening, dahlias, more skiing, aging-into-athleticism. And with those things came BIG MILLENNIAL HOBBY ENERGY, the shape of which I didn’t quite understand until I began to see the contrast between my approach to hobbies with others in my hobby social groups who’ve been in the spaces for much, much longer.
So here are some initial, still-evolving attempts to define what I’m talking about:
1.) Millennial Hobby Energy Goes Very Big Very Fast
Many bourgeois or upwardly aspirational millennials have a hobby story similar to mine. Maybe they had a period in their teens or early 20s where they did something just because they liked it. But most people came to understand activities as “achievements” early on: if you’re doing something that’s not directly related to grades, then it should be extremely legible as a line on your college resume.
If you did what we called an extra-curricular, it was less because it was fun, or because you wanted to, but because “it looked good,” or communicated something “interesting” or “well-rounded” about your personality. And when you instrumentalize leisure in this way, you lose touch with your understanding of what leisure even is. Did you like basketball? Did you like playing the piano? Or did you do it because it — or something like it — was what you did?
Within this framework, there was very little room for activities that resisted narrativization in a college essay. Hobbies that didn’t produce something, or help someone, establish you as superlative, or in some way highlight your entrepreneurial spirit weren’t really hobbies at all. They were fucking around: invisible, if not altogether shameful. Listening to music = not a hobby. Scrapbooking = not a hobby. Zine making could be a hobby, but only if you distributed it to every high school in your metro area and formed a movement around it, etc. etc. (On this subject, I always refer people to Malcolm Harris’s Kids These Days, which outlines how millennials came to understand themselves as a product to be ameliorated).
Now that many millennials have trudged through burnout and are trying to figure out who they are outside of work, hobbies can feel like an easy remedy: if you can figure out what you like to do outside of work, then you’ll have something to do other than work. (Worth noting that often that thing is intensive parenting — and we can discuss how it is and isn’t a hobby).
It makes sense that whatever hobby we find we like doing…..we struggle not to turn it into work. I don’t even mean getting paid for doing it, although we’ll get to that later. We make it hard because when something’s hard, and complete it anyway, it feels like we’re “being productive.” And the more productive we are, the better we feel.
You could reframe this impulse to be more like “we make it challenging, because we like a good challenge!” And I get that; I can make that argument. But I also think a lot of us are addicted to the feeling of ardor — of doing things on hard mode — and knowing that if we just apply our ambition and dedicate enough hours, we’ll figure it out.
This is how we transform side projects into life-consuming behemoths. We make knitting, or cycling, or training guide dogs our entire personalities. We might be at peace with not being the best at it — being a type-A perfectionist is embarrassing these days — but we still feel like we need to be doing a whole lot of it.
In my case, I could’ve kept my dahlia growing project small, low stakes, and highly manageable. I still think it’s pretty low stakes, but it is massive and unwieldy and devouring in a way I really like 90% of the time (I’m only really weary with it on my tenth hour of dahlia tuber clump dividing). Sometimes I fear I’ve evacuated the ease from the hobby — and sometimes I fear I know no other way.
2.) Millennial Hobby Energy Is Trying Very Hard Not To Monetize (But Might Do It Anyway)
Going big and ambitious with a hobby requires capital: money, generally, but also time. And once you invest heavily (or even moderately) a little millennial precarity voice starts whispering in your ear: why not sell a few? Why not do some low-key coaching on the side; why not come up with your own patterns and sell them; why not put some of your pottery on Etsy; why not sell your extra tubers….and make your hobby cost less.
Alternately, why not make your hobby an additional income stream — one to go along with all the other income streams we’re encouraged to cultivate in an increasingly freelanced/independent contractor world. The logic we’ve internalized is pernicious and persistent: if you’re spending time doing something, and there’s a potential to make money off that thing, leaving that money on the table is fiscally irresponsible. It makes you a bad capitalist, sure, but it also means you’ve forgotten the main lesson of coming-into-adulthood during The Great Recession: nothing is guaranteed and you should always be stashing away more money.
Your hobby profits could be part of an fuck off fund! It could help pay off your student loan! It could assuage the guilt that you’re spending money on something unrelated to optimizing your self/body! Extremely current events tell us we have not been wrong to think this way!
We know that monetizing a hobby changes its temperature — there are so many thinkpieces! — but we millennials also tend to believe that what other people write about how things can go wrong doesn’t apply to us. (This is a fine line: we think somehow manage to believe that all the bad things have happened to us….but also that this specific inclination someone else is describing — well that’s avoidable through careful planning and hard work).
So we monetize, and then the monetization goes well and demand grows and we reach a point where we either need to quit it altogether or make it our actual day job (the side hustle becomes main hustle) and then it’s definitely no longer a hobby. The alternative should also be familiar: we chant loudly to anyone who will listen about how we’re refusing to monetize the hobby we’re actually really good at, like a spell to ward off the external and internal impulse. (We’ve been trained to seek praise, and we fucking love it, but we’re very bad at understanding that praise as communicating anything other than “that’s marketable.”)
3.) Millennial Hobby Energy is So Extra
This one’s less a product of precarity or understanding ourselves as a form of human capital and more of a transformative aesthetic sensibility — one that transforms a hobby into a personal brand, with attendant swag and imagery.
I’ve seen this tendency vividly in the dahlia world: the older Gen-Xers and Boomers who’ve been selling for years are, almost always, classic hobbyists who maintained a garden (or breeding path) on the side while working a day job. They sold their tubers informally, at their local dahlia society yearly sale, or through fairly rudimentary websites (some of my favorite examples, from some of the most renowned breeders in the field, are here and here). They have very little if any social media presence; if they do, it’s straightforward (and certainly doesn’t involve reels).
Contrast that approach with, say, The Farmhouse Flower Farm:
There’s a narrative (a “brand story”), a color palette, and multiple income streams (a newly published book, a course, a bouquet bar, plus sales of seeds, bulbs, and tubers). Or Micro Flower Farm, which features some of the biggest millennial hobby energy turned full-time job I’ve ever seen (and has amassed over 900,000 Instagram followers):
When I get a package from one of the old-school breeders, the tubers are simply marked in a big plastic bag. Amazing quality, no frills. When I get a package from a millennial-owned grower, there’s reliably a sticker, a glossy pamphlet, individual organza or burlap bags for each tuber, ribbon of some sort, some sort of doo-dad (spotted paper clips, tiny plastic clothespins) affixing your receipt to the rest of the materials.
Many of these differences can be attributed to familiarity with contemporary tech and design, or even a desire to become familiar with this sort of tech and design. But part of it is an understanding of what makes something successful, particularly amongst fellow millennials: a unified brand image, a story of how you came to growing and why it matters, a slightly parasocial relationship, lots of “touches” (e.g., exposures) to the brand (via social media posts), opportunities for in-person (or virtual) communication (workshops, book releases) that also provide secondary income streams, and a product (in this case, oddly shaped tubers that look like dusty potatoes) rendered “cute” through Pinterest-style flourishes.
Now, something like Farmhouse Flower Farm is no longer the founder’s hobby, but it has millennial hobby energy DNA. Almost every “About Us” story you read on one of these websites evokes “catching the flower bug” and then “jumping in head first” before “taking a big risk” that involves quitting a job or fitting in the business with taking care of kids. For a lot of these hobbyists-turned-business-owners, the “extra” is a manifestation of hard-earned but often unacknowledged soft skills: at social media, at self-branding, at event planning.
To be clear: I eat this stuff up. I could do without the ribbon, but I find the stickers and web design very effective. But they also make me think about our compulsion to brand — and to embroider that brand — and a reciprocal desire to have things branded in order for us, as millennials, to take them seriously.
4.) Millennial Hobby Energy —> Portal Energy
When you reach your late 30s, as many millennials are or have already done, spending a lot of time and resources on something that doesn’t immediately make money or directly benefit your children, optimize your home, or discipline your body can feel radical. Particularly if you’re a woman, in a heterosexual partnership, and have children — or have otherwise been steadily disappearing your wants and desires in favor of fulfilling others’.
It makes sense, then, that going deep on a hobby can lead to feelings of going through the portal — the life shift we’ve talked about a lot around here. The feeling of taking time for yourself and your interests (and resisting the impulse to feel bad about it) can be unsettling. It can unleash a bunch of creative energy, which you then feel compelled organize in some way. It can also feel unwieldy and chaotic, in ways that are sometimes joyful and other times terrifying.
Many people feel their first surge of hobby energy when their kids head to elementary school: if we think of intensive parenting as its own form of hobby, kids going to school is the first time that it cedes time and space for other hobbies to take root. Others report embracing their hobby energy alongside a later-in-life diagnosis/understanding of their neurodivergence: finally, they don’t feel the need to resist their tendency to burrow into a project, or feel bad about dabbling in many hobbies, not just one.
Which brings me to my last, and maybe most important, point:
5.) Millennial Hobby Energy is Not Unique
When millennials were in our teens and twenties, the term “millennial” was wielded as a way to describe how younger people were entering into the world of adulthood — one defined by 9/11 and jingoism, Islamophobia and “post-racial” bullshit, joblessness and precarity, the fissuring of the workplace, the massive expansion of the student debt load, the rapid adoption of smartphones and social media, the decay of legacy journalism, the legalization of gay marriage, the narrative hope of the Obama years and the cruelty of Trumpism. Millennials were optimistic, earnest, spoiled, glossy, scrappy, dorky, and deeply online — and for years, we were understood as young.
Now, it’s Gen-Z (and Gen Alpha) whose experience defines youngness. As for millennials — we grew up and got old. Back when I was a tween flicking through the channels on route to MTV and accidentally start watching thirtysomething and not get any of the references — well, that’s who we are (but not so uniformly white). We’re the parents in My So-Called Life, definitely not the teens. We’re not yet actually “old” but certainly not young, and we’re going through it. Not in ways that aren’t without precedent, but ways that are indelibly ours.
Every generation has had hobbies, hobbyists, and negotiations of the line between leisure and labor. It is part of who we are, figuring out how to live in a capitalist society. But our current, millennial iteration of hobby energy has been shaped not only by the precarity and optimizing impulses of our youth, but also by the realities of our transition into middle age: under the long, lingering shadow of Covid, amidst the rise of local and global fascism and totalitarianism, dependent upon yet resentful of digital technologies, caught in intensive parenting spirals that feel impossible to escape, assailed by personalized advertising, terrified of financial collapse, convinced we’ll work until we die, overburdened with debt, paralyzed by climate change, terrified by massive steps backwards in womens’ and trans rights, and everyday witnesses to genocide.
We are living under duress but with more relative ease and wealth than any other point in human history. We are waking up every morning and trying to figure out how to make a life: how to orient ourselves towards what matters, and what that even is. Of course we’re going to develop, expand, explode, engage and disengage with our hobbies differently.
Right before I wrote this, I spent an hour in my grow room with a scalpel, carefully cutting sprouts off dahlia tubers before rolling them in rooting hormone and setting them up in their little humidity-domed homes, where they’ll sit for the next two weeks and slowly grow roots. You take a cut, put the scalpel in sanitizing solution, write the tag with its name, plug the cutting in its rooting material, and repeat. It’s meticulous work; for most people, I’d imagine it’s boring at best and annoying at worst. But I fucking love it. I love the little tags and the preposterous dahlia names I write on them. I love checking to see if the roots have emerged even when I know well they have not. I love the ceremony of turning all the shop lights on and off, on and off, the dawn and dusk of the plants’ day.
Depending on my vantage point, these cuttings, like all the other hobby stuff I pursue, can feel ridiculous or sacred. It’s a counterpoint to everything I do here — or, more precisely, it’s the complement. It makes me feel and be better, even as so much in our world makes me feel and act worse. It’s so little, ultimately. But more than anything else I’ve done — with this newsletter, with the books, with travels or speaking or recognition — it’s the thing that makes my life feel large. Abundant, sure, but also resilient: and resistant to so many attempts to make it feel small. ●
I’m eager to hear all your thoughts on hobby energy, millennial or otherwise. What does Gen-Z hobby energy look like? Gen-X, Boomer? (Check out Doree’s piece on tennis & Gen-X my-career-disappeared energy). Sometimes I feel like Millennial Hobby Energy most resembles Greatest Generation Hobby Energy??? Or is that just because “Grandma Hobbies” are most adept at taking us away from our phones?
Other things to talk about: why are bourgeois people just generally so fucked up about leisure; is intensive parenting in fact a hobby (or share DNA with millennial hobby energy); how does millennial hobby branding show up in *your* hobby; more thoughts on how neurodivergence intersects with all of this; or anything else you’re eager to discuss — just remember to abide by the Culture Study community norms, not be butts about hobbies or generations, and let’s keep this one of the good places on the internet.
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